Well, as cassmaster said, we’ve been chatting via email about our mutual interest in that thing we’re not supposed to talk about in America: the class system and the myth of meritocracy. So I’ll follow up her post on this topic with one of my own.
A friend of mine found a link to this article on kottke.org, and posted it on facebook, and now I’m posting it here. Ah, the internet.

Originally published in The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Association, it is entitled, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” and is about an issue that is near and dear to my heart, the inequities in the American higher education system.
It’s quite a long article, so I’ll sum it up for you.

His main point: In America’s most elite institutions of higher learning the main priority is not to educate the best and brightest students we’ve got, but instead to maintain the existing class structure.

I think he’s right. Don’t believe him, or me? Here are some other points he makes with which I wholeheartedly agree. (Yes, I went to an elite school. No, I don’t have an axe to grind. I love the place, tremendously, but the facts are the facts.)

1. Seeking ‘diversity’ in elite schools primarily means trying to attract students who are racial or ethnic minorities. However, quite often these minority students are from privileged backgrounds. (He does not state this, but a case in point: a few years ago, the average annual family income for African American students at Stanford was $250,000.) This means that colleges beef up their diversity statistics by fighting over students who are already in a position to attend whatever college they choose. Look, I know there are exceptions. But trust me: this is the way it usually goes.
2. The culture in elite schools is classist. It trains students, in ways both overt and subtle, to think they are better than people who attended less prestigious schools. (I’m not claiming that this classism is intentional, or even recognized, or that every person in every elite educational institution is classist, so don’t freak out! I’m saying that classism is a byproduct of the culture at elite schools, and I stand by this claim.)
3. There is a belief among those in elite institutions that academic and intellectual achievements are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
4. Students at elite colleges and universities are treated differently by their professors than students at less prestigious schools. Their opinions are valued more, they are given more freedom and flexibility, and they are provided with expensive perks. Students at less prestigious schools are subjected to more rigid requirements and treated as subordinates. This corresponds to the social position these students are expected to occupy when they graduate.
5. Students at elite schools who can’t toe the line socially and/or culturally are often students from underprivileged backgrounds, and they suffer greatly as a result.
6. Regardless of their political leanings, privileged students graduating from elite schools often have no idea how the real world operates, or how to have conversations with people from less privileged backgrounds.

Here are some arguments made in this article that I can’t endorse because I have no experience of them:

1. Elite institutions, and the Ivy League in particular, are rampant with grade inflation, and will give high grades to students just for doing an assignment, regardless of the quality of the work.
2. Ivy League institutions do not endorse the life of the mind. They are becoming glorified vocational schools, preparing students for lucrative careers. They do not encourage students to become passionate about ideas.
3. These schools “have become places of narrow and suffocating normalcy.” Students show no outward signs of being eccentric or different. Everyone feels compelled to maintain the kind of appearance that corresponds to future career achievement.
4. Students at elite schools are compulsively, but superficially, social. They avoid solitude. (This seems to me a strange assertion, but it is his claim, not mine.)

So, what do you all think of these ideas?